You must have heard of it by now! It is a social media tool where you chat about whatever you want, you can be sociable or tweet about specialties, totally depending on what you want to chat about. You are limited to 140 characters, so you need to choose your chats or ‘tweets’ carefully to get your point across.

I love tweeting about things! It could be from my thoughts at a particular moment, catching up with friends, giving advice, motivational quotes, advice and much more.

When setting up a Twitter account, think about your username, what you will use your Twitter account for. If you are promoting your brand or products for your business, it is better to use your own name or the ‘brand or website’ that you want to promote to people on the web. Now listen, by ‘brand’ I don’t mean your products, you should always look for the YOU brand first. If marketed correctly, the products will sell. People want to know their true selves, not their SALES.

Your audience on Twitter can be as varied or specific as you like, depending entirely on who you accept as a “follower” or not. You can follow the people that interest you and, in the same way, you can see who wants to follow you. There may be some nasty characters on Twitter, but there is the functionality to ‘block’ a user and report them as ‘spammers’.

It is better to try to connect with other ‘tweeple’ socially and interact where possible rather than trying to ‘sell’ things to them; this can be considered spam and is not acceptable on Twitter.

If you are a student and you are stuck with an essay or dissertation, throw the question to Twitterland and as for opinions, you will soon receive a lot of responses. Similarly, if you want to seek advice or interact with other tweeple, throw in a question, phrase, or statement and see what it answers.

If you want to show your appreciation for what others have ‘tweeted’ about, you can share or otherwise known as re-tweet or RT the information, on your own list. This will include sending the information to other users who may not be in your next group.

Hash marks are used to ‘group’ a topic of interest, for example #self motivation you can use them in your tweets as a search for “keywords”. Users can search for hash tags that will group the topics together and display all relevant tweets that are in the range of #self-motivation, for example.

You can add photos and URL links to tweets, but in some cases it is better to shorten the links as this consumes the valuable 140 characters. There are sites that can shorten links for you, so research this online through any search engine.

Try to give value to the messages you send on Twitter. People love useful information, NOT business SPAM! I hope this information has been useful to you. Let me know by leaving me a comment below.